First, I am going to make an assumption. That assumption is that characters that do stuff are more fun then characters that do little or nothing. It is an obvious flaw in a role-playing session, your character not being able to do anything, and it has many and varied causes: from the my character doesn't have any useful skills to being overshadowed by loud and attention-seeking players. But it isn't fun one way or the other. Players come to the session to play their characters foremost, and to be part of a group secondarily. In order to feel successful as a role-player, their character has to take some of the action and make it their own.
Just doing things that are important to your character is generally more important then the capability of doing things. A quick example: You are just joining up with a group of players who have been playing Legend of the Five Rings for some time. Their Samurai are considered legends around the realm, their Shugenjas can paste undead warriors at fifty paces while completing an elaborate tea ceremony. You piddling new character is fresh out of training and might be able to notice that he had been cut in half dueling one of the Samurai. . .maybe. How can such a character get to do anything in the group? It is unlikely he has any skills to help out, he's a hindrance in a fight, and he has no chance of beating anybody in a poetry contest.
But wait – he could have plot. He could be on a quest. He could need to duel the samurai that slaughtered his family, and his honor calls for him to do it himself. This may even involve the rest of the party trying to teach him to get him ready, offering excellent role-playing interludes for those lonely nights in camp. It might give the whole group something to do while they are on the road. Why, that might even be fun. (if you find role-playing breakfast fun, that is).
Some people might call that having a background. But when I say a character has plot, I mean that they have goals. Plot doesn't come to them or from their past: they make the plot, bring it to the party, and involve the party in it without the GM ever raising a finger. That is a how a character brings plot into a campaign, giving it life, A GM brings in plot through the traditional means and while that plot may be related to a character or character background, if the character doesn't have motivations to interact with it, the plot disappears or is swallowed up by the rest of the party. The guy with the +30 sword decides to deal with it and the plot is over.
Any actor will tell you that "motivation" is how you understand a character's lines and make them real. The same is true with a role-playing character. You use the characters motivations to bring it to life and bring it into the party and to have fun.
So, how do you ensure your character has proper motivation? The obvious answer is practice and experience, but I will now put forth the method that I use for my players. I call it the Goal Grid. The Goal Grid is made up of two elements: goal term and goal scope.
Goal Term
Term is simply how long it is likely to take to accomplish this goal. Or at least, how long the character perceives it taking. I tend to break this up into three categories: Short, Medium, and Long.
Short-term goals are simple things such as "I need to find food" or "The evil penguin cult on the hill has my sister captive and I need to rescue her from their evil clutches." These are what your character is doing right now. Short-term goals can be the most important of the goals, because they clearly define the actions the character takes during the session. In the process of character creation, it is essential to create one or two short-term goals for your character. Whenever the action pauses or your character has time to think, taking quick stock of the short-term goals will give you an easy cheat sheet for what to do next with your character.
Long-Term goals are goals that the character has for his life. "I want to become King by my own hand" or "destroy all the evil followers of the dark squishy penguin god" are long-term goals. (Assuming that Squishy penguin gods have multiple followers, that is.) These may be your character's dreams or ambitions, or just the long road they have been put on by misadventure or overeager prophets. Regardless, these are what keep your character moving and adventuring and a good chunk of the campaign should be devoted to working towards these goals. Generally, a character won't need too many of these. Too many might even be a problem.
One more note about long-term goals: the player and the character will likely have different long-term goals. Players often come up with wild things that their player wouldn't even think of and most of the time this is fine. It is a positive: the player is putting extra work and usually investing out-of-game time in the destiny of their character. On occasion, players get very attached to the goals they believe their character should meet even though the GM or the dice say differently. (The character may have the same problem, of course.) The story may not turn out as you designed. That is, after all, why we role-play instead of write novels. Just trust the GM and keep on moving.
Of course, there are also Medium-Term goals that fall in-between the other two. These are usually two to five sessions in length and are often "sub-plots" of one nature or another. It is a fairly good practice to use these as connecting goals, but role-playing is rarely structured enough to see that play out as well as a novel would. "Now that I have rescued my sister from the freezing chamber of the penguin cult, I need to return her home to our parents on the other side of the boiling sea" is a medium-term goal. You'll probably spend a few sessions doing it, but it isn't the campaign.
Goal Scope
Scope is not how long the goal will take, but what it involves. Goals with a small scope usually just involve the character or small items. Again, I break the scope into three categories – small, medium and large.
Small-scope goals could also be called personal goals. They just involve the character, at least in effect. That is, the character is the only one directly affected by the goal. "I must learn the ways of the penguin cult" is a small-scope goal, although the term (or length) of that goal may vary depending upon how readily available the sacred texts of squishy penguiness are for the common adventurer. Small-scope goals are important because they are things the character can work on when left alone or lost in the city. Again, this works to give your character things to do even without direction from the party or even the GM.
Medium-scope goals involve a small group of people. The most common people are the party or that princess ruthlessly imprisoned in the Antarctic ice caves. The advantage of medium-scope goals is that they directly connect you to the group you are involved with. This can work wonders for becoming part of the group. If your goal is to lead the adventuring party through the ice dungeon of Freezor, you have a connection to the party established and your character is likely to have motivation to stay with the group.
Large-scope goals involve the player in the world. They often involve kingdoms, worlds, cults, religions, or whatever other political social entity that exists in the game world. As a GM, having large-scope goals among your players involves them directly in the overriding plot and politics of the world. If they are out to stop the Evil Penguin cult from influencing the King of O-van into starting war, they are going to easily slide into the web of intrigue you have planned. As players, having large scope goals makes the campaign seem more real as the players tend to "think outside the dungeon" and feel less trapped by quest-like plots. If you are planning on becoming King by your own hand, it is a safe bet you'll have to figure out what you are going to rule before you do.
The players and the GMs do need to spend a little time making sure the scope of the goals are within the scope of the campaign. If it is supposed to be a dungeon-crawl-only, that goal of bringing peace to the frozen kingdom of Isebaux and their hundred year war against Varmeir might be good for flavor text role-playing, but it is unlikely to ever be anything else. The player should be aware of this, as should the GM.
Fill in the Grid
Quickly, imagine a grid with nine boxes. Along the top is Short, Medium and Long. Words along the left side read Small, Medium and Large. Okay, you have managed to imagine the Goal Grid.
If you were to put a goal in each one of those boxes you would suddenly have a character. They are no longer just the "elf" but rather they appear to have depth and personality when you play them. These things can be fleshed out individually – personality, background, culture – but that grid gives you enough to play and appear like you know what you are doing. In fact, your character might even be busy. Good job: you're role-playing.
Goals Are Not Static
This should be obvious but I will state it anyway. Goals change. Some goals appear and disappear in one session, like "I need a warm bath after facing that penguin golem." That's good, and you probably would never write it down or record it. In fact, the only time you might actually write down short-term small-scope goals would be during character creation. After that, you don't worry about them, they just happen. Big goals change too, sometimes on completion, sometimes because the character changes. This is character development.
Now you can be a good, hard-working industrious player and write down the new goals after every session to use as reference at the start of the next, keeping track of things that happened and how they influence the goals. That would be great. But you are not a hard-working industrious player, so what you are really doing is imagining the grid in your head when you need your character to make an action. If it is something small, you're looking in the boxes on the upper left. When the King asks you what boon he can give you for saving his daughter from the cults icy clutches, you look to the other side to come up with an answer worthy of a King. The grid, after all, is just a tool to help those who need. There are always the lucky ba. . .I mean, players out there that can do this stuff without thinking.
Final Words
Get goals. Get role-playing. Get those penguin cultists.Bonus Material!
The Evil Penguin Cult of the Dark Squishy Penguin God Freezor
Not for the faint of heart. He's evil.
Beliefs of the Faith
The Penguin God Freezor believes that only the strong should survive in this world and that cold is the ultimate test of strength. Only by constant struggle against the ever encroaching and undefeatable cold can a person reach enlightenment and passage to the world beyond.
The world beyond is a place of pure beauty and understanding where all suffering stops. However, the walls of this world are eroded by each person that accepts the heat. They leech the heat from the world, each moment they spend under the sun is one less day the great world can survive for the chosen that pass there upon death.
Essentially, this means that the cultists believe there is only so much heat to go around in the afterlife and the real world, and that using up the heat to warm mortal souls is a blasphemous waste and these foul unbelievers are actually dooming the souls of the Cultist's ancestors as well as the actual cultist's souls. Thus, they must do their best to destroy or convert as many people as possible in the name of their god so that the afterlife will last longer.
Ironically, many of the cultists actually plan on getting killed in these attempts. This has to do with the ones without hope of stopping the evil warm blooded people from destroying the land beyond. They figure they should enjoy as much of the land beyond as they can before its eventual collapse so they die quickly (yet faithfully!) to reach their afterlife and finally know peace ... for a while.
Freezor chose the penguin as his symbol and as his avatar, for they embody that spirit of facing the cold and avoiding the heat. Penguins alone among animals understand the grave need to preserve the world beyond and they must be worshiped and revered by all cultists.
Practices of the Cult
The Penguin Cultists tend to gather near highly populate regions of the world. They need to be as close to these sources of heat-users as possible, so as to stop as many as they can. They inevitably dwell in caverns beneath the earth enchanted with everlasting cold. They were robes of white and black, usually with the white in front and the rest of the robe being black. The priests wear a bit of color around their necks, and the high priest of any coven will have a frilly feather headdress that protrudes from under his hood.
Their rituals are usually long and monotonous. They will starve themselves for days while standing in circles slowly waving back and forth. In the center of the room will be a cauldron filled with the "Essence of Freezor" which is a substance blessed by the priests and is designed to represent the squishy vomit that Freezor regurgitates to feed the souls of his followers. These rituals may go on for months, this squishy fish oil filled substance being the cultists only sustenance.
The main activity of the cult is destroying heat-users. This can take many forms, but usually they spend their time attempting to create the dreaded Penguin Golems and unleash them upon society. But creating these creatures is by no means an easy task. The cultists need the bodies of 30 victims, each sacrificed individually in an elaborate ritual involving freezing their heads in blocks of ice. The victims heads are left in the ice while the cultists use the bodies to build the golem. They need dark and light skinned individuals so that the golem can maintain the correct penguin coloration and tend to be overly fond of elves and their pasty white skin.
Once the Golem is built, it needs to be activated by lengthy ritual that involves a hundred pounds of fish (usually herring) left to rot and then shoved down the gullet of the creature. Ironically, this fish substance is very similar to the blessed squishy vomit of the dark god. When finally completed, the golem animates. Its skin covers with a sheen of rock hard ice, protecting it from all but the hardest blows. The same covering encases the beak, making it hard and razor sharp. These abominations of Freezor can often stand twenty feet tall and are strong enough to push buildings around and stone walls to the ground. They are fury unleashed. Or as one great sage wrote, "Waddling Fury". Many a great hero has paled at the site of a golem's head bobbing back and forth in the distance.
The golems are, of course, susceptible to fire, although it makes an absolutely horrid smell that usually causes strong men to retch. But damaging the outer golem can do no more then injure it – it will not stop the wicked magics that drive its motivation. Only when the core of rotting fish is soaked in lye and then heated will the beast finally stop clacking its beak in a menacing manner. Until then, it will slowly regrow even its burned sections.
Stopping the golem is not an easy task. It is a task for heros.
